McConnell’s plan to shut down Obama

HENDERSON, Ky. — Mitch McConnell has a game plan to confront President Barack Obama with a stark choice next year: Accept bills reining in the administration’s policies or veto them and risk a government shutdown.

In an extensive interview here, the typically reserved McConnell laid out his clearest thinking yet of how he would lead the Senate if Republicans gain control of the chamber. The emerging strategy: Attach riders to spending bills that would limit Obama policies on everything from the environment to health care, consider using an arcane budget tactic to circumvent Democratic filibusters and force the president to “move to the center” if he wants to get any new legislation through Congress.

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In short, it’s a recipe for a confrontational end to the Obama presidency.

“We’re going to pass spending bills, and they’re going to have a lot of restrictions on the activities of the bureaucracy,” McConnell said in an interview aboard his campaign bus traveling through Western Kentucky coal country. “That’s something he won’t like, but that will be done. I guarantee it.”

McConnell is facing one of the toughest reelection battles of his three-decade Senate career. But Republicans are tantalizingly close to winning majorities in both houses of Congress for the first time in nearly a decade, and McConnell is making an aggressive pitch to voters here that they have the chance to pick the Senate’s next majority leader.

But there are clear risks for McConnell. First, he must defeat a spirited Democratic challenger in November, while hoping that the class of Senate candidates he helped recruit doesn’t blow the GOP’s best chance in years to retake the majority. And, perhaps just as challenging, McConnell would need to bring unity to a party that is struggling to overcome divisions between establishment stalwarts like himself and young GOP upstarts pushing for conservative purity.

One of the Senate’s leading GOP firebrands — Ted Cruz of Texas — isn’t committing to supporting McConnell as majority leader, signaling the challenges that could lie ahead.

“That will be a decision for the conference to make,” Cruz said in an interview, after pausing eight seconds, when asked if he’d back McConnell as majority leader. “I’m hopeful come January we have a Republican majority.”

Meanwhile, McConnell risks overreaching if he follows through with his pledge to attach policy riders to spending bills. If Obama refuses to accept such measures, a government shutdown could ensue. Republicans bore much of the blame for last year’s government shutdown, which was prompted by conservative tactics McConnell opposed, and their fortunes rebounded only when the administration bungled the rollout of Obamacare.

But asked about the potential that his approach could spark another shutdown, McConnell said it would be up to the president to decide whether to veto spending bills that would keep the government open.

Obama “needs to be challenged, and the best way to do that is through the funding process,” McConnell said. “He would have to make a decision on a given bill, whether there’s more in it that he likes than dislikes.”

A “good example,” McConnell said, is adding restrictions to regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency. Adding riders to spending bills would change the “behavior of the bureaucracy, which I think has been the single biggest reason this recovery has been so tepid,” he said.

“He could,” McConnell said calmly when asked if such a tactic would prompt Obama to veto must-pass appropriations bills. “Yeah, he could.”

If Republicans gain a Senate majority, it will surely be a thin one. If McConnell wants to accomplish much of anything, he’ll have to strike a delicate balance between courting some Democrats while adhering to the demands of his right flank hungry for conservative legislation like gutting Obamacare.

To pass a budget, as McConnell is promising, he would have to hold together a conference that would include conservatives like Cruz and moderates like Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. He’d likely need Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid’s help to pass major legislation, even though he’s been at war with the Nevada Democrat, who blames McConnell for causing historic gridlock.

There would also be pressure from the handful of Republican senators planning a White House run, not to mention GOP senators running for reelection in blue and purple states like New Hampshire, Wisconsin and Ohio — an election map that gives Democrats a major advantage in winning a majority all over again in 2016.

McConnell is well aware of the difficulties ahead should he finally achieve his political dream.

“Being leader is sort of like being the groundskeeper to a cemetery: Everybody is under you but nobody is listening,” he said with a big laugh, crediting Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander for coming up with the line.

Even as he’s close to reaching the pinnacle of his power, the 72-year-old McConnell is locked in a neck-and-neck struggle with a 35-year-old Democrat and political newcomer, Alison Lundergan Grimes. As occupant of one of two Republican-held seats Democrats have a chance to win this year, McConnell is facing an avalanche of Democratic attacks seizing on his poor approval ratings by painting him as a creature of Washington. When it’s all said and done, McConnell said he expects the total cost of the race to range between “$60 million-$100 million.”

Asked about his low approval ratings — one Democratic poll pegged him at 37 percent last week — McConnell blamed negative media coverage in the state.

“I don’t want to sound like a whiner here, but if you get beat up all the time, it affects you,” McConnell said in his bus decorated with his logo, “Kentucky Leads America.” “All people hear about is unpleasant things.”

At his campaign events last week with Kentucky’s more popular junior senator, Republican Rand Paul, McConnell made brief remarks slamming the White House as elitist and stoked coal country’s fear about keeping Reid at the helm of the Senate.

As he spoke in a warehouse of an electronics and industrial services shop here before a crowd of several dozen, McConnell bluntly told voters that they are effectively choosing the next majority leader: a Kentuckian or “somebody from Nevada who is completely in the tank with the administration.”

At an earlier event at a trucking company in Greenville, Kentucky, with Paul standing beside him, McConnell cited Reid’s now-infamous line from 2008 that “coal makes us sick,” noting that Grimes’ “first vote” would keep the Nevada Democrat in charge.

“That kind of talk makes me sick and you sick, and this is the year to stick it to him!” McConnell, standing between two Mack trucks, said before cheering supporters.